When the novelist, memoirist and playwright Elspeth Sandys was younger, she used to tell “great big whoppers”. Which is another way of describing the making up of stories. She is still making up stories because that, obviously, is what writers do.
Her latest book, A Gap in Nature, is a story about three generations of one family: about May, who is English and a snob, ending up in small-town New Zealand in an environment where she is both alienated and where she alienates herself; and about the perils of uncovering something very nasty lurking in the woodshed that is the past.
It is a bit sexy. She is worried, but not very worried, that it might be “borderline pornographic”. It isn’t. It is dark and complex and also very funny. Here is May on her fat sister-in-law, Pearl: “The shop assistant who persuaded her to buy that frock should be shot, May thinks as she submits to the inevitable embrace. The trail of buttons across Pearl’s ample bosom makes her look like a ham studded with cloves.”
I’ll never be able to look at the Christmas ham in quite the same way, I say. That paragraph made me laugh out loud, which is always a happy response to a paragraph. She is glad it made me laugh. She likes laughing and is not afraid of crying or candour.
She has written, in addition to nine previous novels, two collections of short stories, a non-fiction account of a trip to China in pursuit of the story of her cousin Rewi Alley, a number of plays – performed here and in the UK – and two very candid memoirs. She was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2006 for services to literature. Her most recent play, The Body Politic, filled Circa Theatre in Wellington last year.
She believes all writing is autobiographical. “Write from your own vulberability,” she was advised early in her writing career. She has said she took the advice to heart, “sometimes with painful consequences”.
So when you read her work you also get to play at being a detective, and what you are attempting to detect is which bits are autobiographical. She is unlikely to ever run out of stories.
Adopted child
Sandys is what was then one of the most stigmatised of children, the illegitimate child, the result of a fling. She spent the first nine months of her life in the Truby King Karitane hospital in Dunedin.
She was adopted by Tom and Alice Somerville when he was 68 and she 48. I can’t tell you the year because that would give away her age and she’s buggered if she’s going to give away her age. She intends to go on working and New Zealanders are ageist, she says.
Her parents were old. She called her mother’s friends “the cardigan ladies”. Tom was a printer and publisher; Alice had been a hospital matron. Alice was used to being a powerful, authoritative woman, but after she married her world shrank because women of her generation were expected to give up working. “She should never have married,” says Sandys.
Alice didn’t like her adopted daughter. She had never wanted to adopt a girl but her husband wanted a girl. So they got Elspeth and Elspeth got the whack. Alice was fond of the wooden spoon and her husband’s razor strop. She never hit her adopted son. Tom tried to protect his daughter but he died when she was 14. Alice continually reminded Elspeth she was adopted and that she ought to be very grateful. “‘We’ve given you a home.’ I got quite a bit of that.”
Sandys loved Tom and he loved her back. She just wanted her mother to love her, she says, as all children do. Children loved Tom and always wanted to cuddle him because he was nice and round and friendly, she says.
There’s a portrait of the pair of them with Alice in a fur coat wearing her hair in tight marcel waves. Her mouth is as tight as those waves. She radiates disdain. You cannot imagine any child wanting to cuddle her.
She should never have married.
In addition to being nasty, Alice was also mad. She was in and out of the bin. I said I knew a bit about mad mothers. So we went on to have what was really a very jolly time comparing the horrors our respective mad mothers inflicted on us. That’s the thing about those of us who have had mad mothers: you have to turn them into funny stories so as to survive them.
Sandys married her first husband at age 19. She liked that first husband but they were too young when they met and divorced after eight years. He came from a respectable, successful family and she was an aspiring actor. Actors were regarded as wild and wicked. Not respectable. We say, almost in unison: “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.”
She left in search of that acting career for London, from where she dutifully wrote to her mother. Alice would reciprocate by sending her very strange presents. One Christmas she sent her daughter a size 40 corset. Sandys was, and still is, a size 10.
So, yes, our very jolly time involved a lot of laughing. She is, as previously mentioned, an enthusiastic laugher. She says of the enormous corset: “I thought that was a bit odd.” She is very good at understatement.
She once wrote about her mother that she was “the saddest person I’ve ever seen”. Which might be the saddest sentence ever written. “Yes. I do feel heartbroken for her. She had a dreadful childhood.” Alice’s mother, also called Alice, tried to drown herself and her six children in a river. “I wish I could believe in the – is it the Hindu thing – where you come back because you get a second chance? I would like to think she could be reincarnated and have a happier life.” And be a happier person? “Yes.”
Is she a happy person? “I’m a cheerful person, I think.” The distinction, she says, is: “I think cheerful people, their persona, is probably a bit of a cover for, maybe, unhappiness, trauma or whatever. I don’t want those things, but I’m created by them so they’re part of me. But I do love to laugh. I love being with people who make me laugh. I think that’s kind of a gift from God.”
I say I’m glad she had Tom. “Yes, me too. Every day I’m glad. I think I would have been locked up.”
She seems quite normal. “Yeah. I think I fool people most of the time.” She might have been a good actor.
Those “great big whoppers” were about her birth parents. No, they weren’t. They were about imaginary parents. Making up stories is a form of escape, and in the stories she told as a girl she invented another pair of parents.
“I’d say my father was a pilot who had been shot down. And my mother was a ballet dancer. Sometimes she was a tightrope walker. She was all kinds of wonderful things. So finding the real ones was a bit of a letdown.”
Her birth mother died before she could meet her. She did find and meet her father. He was rich, racist and right-wing. She is a “far-left socialist”. Employing again that art of understatement, she says, “I didn’t warm to him.”
Rats to all that
She lives in Wellington in a 1940s Art Deco apartment that she loves. She says she’s a country girl, really. “But I’m grateful in this part of my life to be surrounded by coffee bars and theatres and restaurants.”
She lives on her own. “I have for quite a long time, ever since the marriage to Maurice ended. I gave up on men after that.”
Maurice was Maurice Shadbolt, the writer otherwise known as an enthusiastic philanderer and all-round bounder. He became husband No 3 in November 1993.
It took her a while to give up on men, then. “A few dummy runs. I was from a generation where that’s what you did. You got married and you had children. You’re allowed to go to university … but your real destiny was children and marriage and looking after your very successful husband.”
On dummy run No 3, she says she was desperate to return to New Zealand and she had no money and nowhere to go. Shadbolt offered a way. Also, he wooed her in a way now known as love bombing. He knew how to woo with words. There were beautiful letters and telephone calls. He made her feel as though she was the only person in the world.
She would later find out he was simultaneously making another woman feel as though she was the only person in the world.
She moved into Shadbolt’s dump of a shack in the bush in Titirangi, Auckland. On the first day, she opened the pantry to find a dead rat. She might have taken that as an omen. The rat in the pantry wasn’t the only rat in the Titirangi shack.
Shadbolt began his long campaign of wooing her when she was still married to her second husband, actor Bruce Purchase. He was hopeless with money – of which there was very little – a drinker and “a fantasist”. She knows how to pick them.
Perils of honesty
If you believe all writing is autobiographical, people will read your books looking for the autobiography and will sometimes believe they are in your books. And they might not like reading about the characters they believe to be based on them.
Sandys has had the experience of people believing she had written about them when she hadn’t. And some people, she says, think she’s written about them without actually having read the book.
She thinks this is pretty funny. You can’t do anything about it. Honest writing has its perils, and all you can do is shrug and keep writing.
Author and critic David Hill once described Sandys as “an attentive, lucid, modest writer”. Here is an echo: she is an attentive, lucid, modest person.
She has a daughter, the left-wing political commentator Josie Pagani, to whom she is close, and a son who lives in Wales. She doesn’t really know what he does. The most she will let me say about him is that they have a complex relationship. “Families are very delicate.”
Her new play, Shelter, which has just had its first read-through at Devonport’s Victoria Theatre, is about a mother and son who go on a tramping weekend and have to take shelter from a storm in a hut. The atmosphere is claustrophobic and tense. Hidden family secrets are revealed. It’s a piece of Sandys’ writing, so, surprise!
We had a lengthy and enjoyably bonkers conversation about people who think they are geniuses and who clearly aren’t. In her short story Advice, she writes about an encounter with another woman writer when the marriage to Shadbolt was deteriorating. She was told if she thought Shadbolt was a genius she had some sort of weird obligation to stay with him.
We agree we have yet to meet a genius, because they don’t exist.
Well, she says, she has read about my sheep and maybe some of my sheep might be geniuses. That is the right thing to say. I like her and her name so much I tell her I’m going to name a lamb after her. “Oh. I am so hugely flattered.”
I tell her I named my first lamb Elizabeth Jane after one of my favourite writers, the English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, whom I once interviewed. She goes very quiet, then says: “Oh, Michele. This is really weird. I’m having goosebumps. I knew Jane really well. Her daughter Nicky is one of my best friends.”
It is a nice thing to have, if peripherally on my part, another thing in common that doesn’t involve mad mothers.